


no wrong roads and no window stays closed

by raven (singlecrow)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, anns a' Ghàidhealtachd, three weeks of Scottish honeymoon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:47:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24724780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/raven
Summary: This is not a date. It merely.... has a date-like quality.
Relationships: Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood
Comments: 12
Kudos: 147





	no wrong roads and no window stays closed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soupytwist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soupytwist/gifts).



This is not a date. Date implies... well, more actual intention. This is just a meal, not eaten inside the house, that does not consist of anything tinned or vacuum-packed or eaten in a panicky rush between disasters. This has plates, and cutlery, and a menu from which you can choose both dinner and dessert.

They’re not in hiding, after all. As far as the tiny village of Càrn na Marbh is concerned, they’re two eccentric southerners who have, for reasons of their own, camped out in a falling-down cabin halfway up a hill on the edge of a sea loch. No reason why they shouldn’t emerge occasionally and contribute to the local economy.

So... pub. Martin had almost forgotten how you go up to a bar and order things, but he opened his mouth and words came out and after that they gave him a pint glass with beer in it, so it must have gone all right. Jon seems to have acquired a taste for bad whisky from Daisy. They have scallops, which taste just as nice as you would expect for something that was scudding through the said sea loch a few hours earlier. And then they’re sitting opposite from each other in a quiet, well-lit place, next a window with a lovely view, and there might be… well. A date-like quality.

“A quality,” Jon says, when Martin voices this thought. He sounds amused, which is so rare these days that Martin’s heart twists for a moment.

“A bit,” he says. “I mean, it’s not exactly how I pictured it going, for sure."

“I don’t know,” Jon says, looking out the window over the loch. The sun is setting in glorious purplish extravagance, dim and lovely over the water. “I think it could be worse.”

Martin smiles, following Jon’s gaze and then looking back at the large, high-beamed, smoky-at-the-corners pub. Someone on the other side of the bar is playing a fiddle and singing, softly in another language, so it’s a sweet part of the background noise rather than intrusive.

“What’s the song about?” he asks idly, gesturing at the musician as Jon looks away from the glass.

Jon concentrates for a minute, looks amused as before, then his expression changes. “Òganaich uir rinn a m’fhàgail,” he murmurs. “It’s, ah. A bit pornographic.”

“Perfect,” Martin says. He has an image, suddenly, of another life. One where he and Jon might be able to live in the world like this, quietly with beautiful things all around them, and the Archivist’s power would just be a party trick. 

Jon smiles at him, wistful, as though he were thinking something similar. He gets up for a minute, fetches a glass of water and another tumbler of whisky from the bar. The barman seems to be asking how he, a southerner with an accent that could etch glass, comes to speak Gaelic. “I don’t, exactly,” Jon says, followed by, “Chosg e tòrr dhomh."

The barman looks profoundly confused. Jon comes back to Martin and sets down the tumblers, half-distracted. It takes Martin a moment to realise _he’s_ the distraction; that the all-seeing avatar of the Beholding has forgotten what he’s doing because Martin is in his line of sight. “I love you,” Jon says, as though he’s just thought of it, and again, Martin feels that twist in the heart: that sense of all things quiet and beautiful. 

“You, too,” he says. He leans in and kisses Jon, very lightly. Another reason it’s a night with a date-like quality, rather than a date: the feeling that they’ve been doing this for years. Circling around each other like birds on an updraught, waiting for the wind to fall. 

They pay up and head home eventually, tipping generously because they’re strangers here. Martin has been in the habit of worrying about money most of his adult life, and hasn’t got used to the fact that neither he nor Jon has spent anything of their perfectly respectable salaries for more than a year. Maybe they _could_ run away, start a pub on the edge of a loch just like this one and be pillars of the community with a mysterious past. 

“Not all that mysterious,” Jon says, giving Martin a hand over a rough bit of the scramble. Daisy certainly embraced the art of the inaccessible when she built or bought or found this place. “We both used to work for an academic institute. It wasn’t a good environment. We left.”

“And you got that” - Martin tips his head to indicate down at Jon’s burnt right hand, currently gripping his— “doing archival work?”

“You shouldn’t bring sources of ignition into an archive,” Jon says.

“And the worms?”

“You shouldn’t bring worms into an archive either, Martin, do keep up."

“No wonder we left.” Martin smiles to himself, and then: “We didn’t leave.”

“No.” Jon lets go of him as they reach what passes for level ground, up here. The hillside spills down in front of them into the loch, its black edges stark against the small lights of the village. Everything of the world that isn’t the immediate here and now - anything not the rocks and water, the bracken, the low lights and Jon — seems very far away. “We didn't. We can't leave.”

It ought to be an Archivist-type thought, ringing and portentous. Martin's not sure why it isn't. But he looks over at Jon, who seems utterly normal, a tired thirty-something man at the end of a long day, and thinks it's just a strange gift of this night's stillness, a natural consequence of scallops and whisky tumblers and folk songs about cocks. 

"I know," Martin says, and grips Jon's hand with intention this time. If this is it, their measure of all things quiet and beautiful, he'll take it just as it comes.

**Author's Note:**

> "òganaich uir" isn't all that pornographic, really! it's in the delivery.


End file.
